Nightfall Shenanigans

This week we got yet another patch for The War Within, one of those smaller ones this time. From what I'm hearing around the internet, reception of this one has been mixed for reasons that do not affect me in any way, so whatever.

I really like the new Nightfall event though. Yes, I realise at this point the open world events have ceased to be novel: fill a bar, fight a boss etc. - but since I enjoy the format, I'm happy to get more content in a similar vein.

The event isn't synced to Beledar changing from light to dark, but one time it happened just as the event started and it felt very atmospheric.

One thing that intrigued me from what I'd heard about it in advance was that this one had a personal progress bar in addition to the one for the overall event. I can only guess that this was Blizz's response to how in the theatre event, when the bar fills up quickly, a significant number of people just go AFK nowadays.

Yet when I arrived for my first encounter with the Nightfall event, I was immediately confused because not only did I not see a personal progress bar, I saw no indications of what exactly was supposed to be happening at all. I saw people run around and kill things, and the marker on the zone map said that the event was in progress, but I saw no progress indicators, objectives or timers whatsoever. I just ran around for a bit trying to get a few hits on mobs in the crowd, and at some point I suddenly got a prompt to rally for a final attack and kill a boss. I joined in for that as well and got credit for completion, so I was satisfied enough, if a little confused.

The weekly quest for the event rewards you with a token to buy a piece of champion gear of your choice by the way, which I thought was great. You get champion gear from delves as well, so several of my alts have plenty of those pieces by now, but as it goes with RNG, often there's just this one slot for which you're just never getting a drop, so being able to outright buy that one immediately delighted me.

Later in the evening I gave the event another go and was baffled to find the area completely empty. This time the UI seemed to work though, and I saw both an event and a personal progress bar, as well as some personal objectives such as to rescue some prisoners, kill a named mob etc. Unfortunately I quickly realised that it wasn't just quiet - I had somehow ended up in a phase where I was literally the only person doing the event, and my holy paladin was taking a looong time to kill an elite with several million health. I think in the end I only completed three or four objectives before the timer ran out, but at least I got a better view of (how I figured) the event is supposed to work.

Funnily enough, on every subsequent run I've been to since then, I've never been able to get the objectives to pop up again. There's just this huge crowd milling about trying to tag nerubians for 1% personal progress and I go along with it. It's not bad if you're a skinner either since a lot of innocent animals get caught up in the carnage.

Sorry, little guy. A warzone is not a good place to be neutral and carefree.

Even with the huge crowds, overall event progress is weirdly slow, which makes me think that someone is getting the objectives, but if that particular person isn't doing them, everything comes to a halt. Or maybe they are bugging out in some way. My evidence for this is that at one point when I was flying around the edge of the event, I saw an objective pop up to "destory Sureki shadecasters" but it was literally only there for a second or so, and then the whole event UI bugged out and disappeared again.

I tried to find more information on the forums, but there people were mainly complaining that apparently the event had been impossible to complete for the first day or so, nothing about the weird bugginess that I was seeing but that didn't stop people from getting credit.

Yet for all the complaints, it seems quite popular - the one time I was by myself seemed to be a weird anomaly, because every other time I've been there it's been very crowded. When the final boss spawns and everyone converges into a single place, it turns into a proper lag fest, which always amuses me. Lag is just a sign of a proper massively multiplayer experience!

I'll probably keep rotating through various alts for several weeks for both the gear and rep rewards. And hopefully the devs will fix it up at some point so that everyone can actually do those objectives, however they are supposed to work exactly.

Adventures in Old Content

I've often said that I consider the speed and ease with which modern WoW makes new content obsolete one of its biggest flaws. Blizzard have actually gotten a little better with this recently - everything added during Dragonflight for example served at least some purpose throughout the entire expansion, meaning that content didn't become entirely obsolete with every new patch.

Still, as a whole, the world of Azeroth is littered with old expansions that tell stories and contain gameplay that people might still find interesting and enjoyable today, but that newer players in particular are simply unlikely to see unless they specifically seek it out, as everyone just gets pushed into the newest expansion and that's that.

That said, while I'm sure that the majority of players largely ignore old content, it's not completely lacking in appeal even after it stopped offering challenges and gear rewards. Transmog farmers and all kinds of collectors in general tend to find plenty of reasons to go back into old expansions to keep adding to their collections.

I think I mentioned before that I've never been a huge fan of transmog farming myself, however my interest in it increased ever since Blizzard lifted the armour type and class restrictions in the run-up to War Within, meaning that if a priest robe drops for your warrior (for example), you can still add its appearance to your collection now, when previously you wouldn't have been able to.

For the most part, I haven't been super consistent in my efforts on that front, but one thing I've remembered to do almost every week is to clear Molten Core and Blackwing Lair on my warrior. They are old raids that I'm very familiar with after Classic and that make me feel quite nostalgic, plus they contain some absolute bangers in terms of outfits that I wanted to collect. Even after months of running both instances every week, there are a couple of pieces that continue to elude me.

I originally did most of this kind of farming on my priest, but switched to my warrior after the former had one of the Thunderfury bindings drop for her (and these are still soulbound, sadly). It then occurred to me that if I did the farming on my warrior instead, I could actually get myself a Thunderfury in retail. Before that, I honestly hadn't even given it any thought in so far as I'd figured it was probably just one of those things from Vanilla that are no longer available in retail, but that was not the case here.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea - no, this post is not about me actually getting said Thunderfury. I've got the Garr binding, but Baron Geddon has so far refused to cough up his part. (He also still owes me an Arcanist Mantle, supposedly his most common gear drop - not in my experience.) However, while you mindlessly run through MC week after week, one-shotting everything in your path, it's easy to fall down a rabbit hole of related projects.

Because there is of course another legendary that comes from MC: Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros. That one requires a blacksmith to craft a Sulfuron Hammer first, but my warrior is in fact also a blacksmith, so it was time to level some classic professions!

Mining went pretty quickly for the most part due to how much Blizzard increased the number of node spawns in Cataclysm, plus of course the ability to fly in the old world - also, I don't know if it's intentional or a bug, but you can mine from the back of your flying mount in old content as well now, not just in the newest expansion, which has come in very handy.

As you get closer to 300, things start to slow down a bit, but I had no problem doing laps around old Silithus for hours. However, at skill level 295 I suddenly noticed that I was no longer getting any skill-ups even from Rich Thorium Veins, and I already knew from my MC runs that Dark Iron didn't give any either. That's not how that used to work in Classic! When did they change this and why? And how the heck are you supposed to get to 300 then?

A bit of research revealed that the only way to get from 295 to 300 in Classic Mining was by smelting Dark Iron Ore, which you can still only learn by doing a quest in BRD, so I did that. And to think I'd actually stopped tapping the Dark Iron Ore nodes during my MC runs since I thought they were worthless nowadays! The things you find out...

Anyway, with all the Thorium I had gathered I was able to skill up Blacksmithing without any major issues, and after Ragnaros actually dropped an Eye of Sulfuras one day, I decided it was time to get onto crafting that Sulfuron Hammer. This still requires you to be exalted with the Thorium Brotherhood, which is not that hard to achieve in retail, fortunately. At first I thought I'd go and actually do the Cata quests in Searing Gorge, since those are supposed to give pretty good rep, but then I realised that I'd actually accumulated so many of the trade-in items from MC trash that it was easier to just go all the way from neutral to exalted using those.

I bought and learned the recipe and looked at the ingredients. 50 Arcanite Bars? Hmm. I knew that transmuting Arcanite had no cooldown in retail, but it turned out that my Jewelcrafter didn't have quite that many Arcane Crystals saved up in her bank. I started prospecting some Thorium, only to realise after a while that you apparently can't get Arcane Crystals from prospecting. Supposedly this was only possible at one point in early Burning Crusade, which might be where I got the idea from. So I did more mining instead.

Once I'd accumulated enough crystals, I sent them alongside a bunch of Thorium bars to the Worgen druid I'd made back in original MoP, who's a herbalist and alchemist and still had to skill up her professions through all the available expansions at the time. Once I started creating the Arcanite Bars, I was delighted to find that she was actually a transmutation master, something I'd long since forgotten but which meant that I got a lot more bars out of my materials than I'd expected. Good job for making that choice, past me.

With the Arcanite sorted, I got ready to craft the Hammer... just to realise that I was in fact still short something, namely some Blood of the Mountain. I hadn't paid particular attention to that item, just chucking it into the guild bank alongside the other miscellaneous old crafting materials that sometimes dropped from MC trash, so I hadn't realised just how rare it was in comparison to everything else and that I still didn't have ten of them even after months of farming.

I was stunned to find that they were several thousand gold a piece even on the auction house, and while I could've just bought them there, it did strike me as kind of expensive and would've been somewhat unsatisfactory to me. Instead I looked up the exact mob they dropped from and made sure in subsequent MC clears to always kill all the Molten Destroyer trash mobs as well. Again, what a surprise to find that such a random item from Vanilla was actually still rare and valuable!

That whole line of discoveries actually reminded me of a little story from my Cataclysm days as well: At the time, my old guild (which was already in decline) had made me an officer, and at some point a guildie I barely knew asked me whether he could have some old crafting mats from the guild bank, including some Blood of the Mountain. I happily agreed and handed it all out for free, thinking it was just a bunch of worthless junk. Needless to say, the GM was not happy with me when he found out, and I felt like a complete idiot once I realised that at least some of the items I had given away were actually still very valuable. In fact, I was so ashamed that I then spent the next few weeks farming MC on my shaman until I could restock the guild bank with all the Blood of the Mountain I had so carelessly given away.

It feels funny to be back to that now, even if it's happening under completely different circumstances. However, at least to me there's also something comforting in knowing that there are still some things in modern WoW that haven't changed that much since Vanilla.

Delving in Season 2

After the rough start I had with delves at The War Within's launch, I slowly warmed up to them over time, and have in fact been really getting into them this season. I completed the seasonal reward track much faster than last time, and also got Brann to the new level cap of 80, after not even hitting the previous companion level cap during Season 1. I'm currently working my way towards the achievement to complete all delves on tier 11 as every role. Tank's all done, dps is mostly there, and healer still has a way to go, but it's only a matter of time.

Blizzard took an (in my opinion) interesting approach to the new season with delves. While they added two new ones, and they are bountiful more often than the old ones, the old delves are still just as valid as a means for gearing up. I still remember when they added the two revamped troll dungeons back in Cataclysm and how burnt out people got on them due to the reward structure encouraging you to run just those two dungeons over and over again. It's nice to see that the devs have learned from some mistakes over the years.

In fact, they put a surprising amount of effort into giving the old delves a seasonal refresh as well, by adding lots of new (mostly goblin-themed) variants to them. I'm still not sure whether I've already seen them all, as Blizz made the strange decision to just add them to the existing "stories" achievements without requiring you to actually tick them off if you already completed the achievement in Season 1. I guess it makes sense to not make achievement hunters lose points (even if temporarily) but as someone who primarily views achievements as a way of keeping track of what I've done and what I haven't, the lack of an actual new achievement to track has been rather unhelpful.

They also made some changes to various delve mechanics, seemingly in an effort to make them less annoying based on player feedback from Season 1, but I've mostly got mixed feelings about those. The addition of the goblin vendor to the underwater delves who sells you underwater breathing for a hefty markup feels like a tacit admission that the "run through air bubbles to keep breathing" mechanic is not very fun and that people just bought underwater breathing potions to simply negate the whole mechanic anyway. It's still much cheaper to bring your own potions than to pay for the goblin's services, but it's helpful if you find yourself running out of consumables due to deaths or simply find yourself at the entrance of the delve realising that you forgot to buy potions entirely.

The way candles and totems were changed from an item you carry with you to a consumable buff that you plop down where you want them to sit feels like an adjustment to the reality that people were always dropping the candle/totem anyway to be able to move freely during combat, but I miss being able to pick it up again for moving, as the new system basically forces you to move in the dark/through poison a lot, which I'm not a fan of.

I also dislike what they've done to the spores in Fungal Folly and Mycomancer Cavern. I actually really liked the way they were a risk vs. reward mechanic in Season 1, where I actually enjoyed aggroing them and dragging them onto enemies to use them as an additional source of damage. Now they are no longer attackable or move, plus their damage to mobs has been dramatically reduced (if they even still do any at all), so they are just a nuisance that means you can't stand still for too long in certain spots.

And the new web mechanics in the Nerubian delves are just more annoying all around, whether it's the little unkillable egg things that you have to keep hitting every so often or else they'll cover the whole floor in webs again, or the respawning flying web spreaders that you can't fully prevent from dropping webs on you at the most inconvenient times.

Of course, the biggest change to delves this season is that Brann was given a tank role. I'm still not entirely clear on why he was only able to support you as dps or healer in Season 1 anyway. I thought it was very telling when I saw someone comment in a discussion about this topic that duh, he can't be a tank because that would completely trivialise the content. This is amusing to me because it does align with my own perception that tanks in modern WoW are way too overpowered. However, I didn't think it was a sufficient explanation because the devs seemed to have similar concerns about healer Brann and worked around those by making it so that he does relatively little direct healing but instead just plops down all these healing potions that the player has to actively pick up.

It's interesting to see WoW wrestling with these sorts of companion issues when I've mainly been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic for the last thirteen years, which has had permanent companions since launch. The SWTOR devs did seemingly also have concerns about companions being overpowered at launch, as healer companions were originally much more limited in what they could do. Specifically they were pretty good at rolling heal-over-time abilities on multiple players at once, but their biggest burst heal put a debuff on the player that prevented that person from receiving another burst heal for fifteen seconds or however long it was, meaning that companion healing was very hobbled compared to that of an actual player. After they threw all of that out the window with the big companion revamp of the 4.0 expansion, healer companions in particular did indeed become very OP, and it's been a long-running complaint that this makes content too easy/prevents new players from learning how to play because their healer comp will just heal them through absolutely everything.

Anyway, I digress - let's return to tank Brann. I tried him out relatively early on and my first impression was mostly positive. It certainly was a lot more fun when doing delves as a healer to actually be able to stand there and heal than to constantly kite and hit self-preservation cooldowns because everything's always aggroed on you no matter what. He did seem to take a lot of damage, way more than a player tank would take under the same circumstances, but I figured that was fine as a way of making the healer work for it in a way that aligned with their play style.

Then Blizz decided to nerf him massively, increasing his damage taken by 60% (among other things) because the spec had "simply proven to be too powerful when players hang back and just focus on healing him" aka when you simply play a healer as intended. This was a massive facepalm moment, though they did roll some of those changes back later on I think.

Either way, I've actually found that tank Brann's biggest issue aren't damage numbers but that his general behaviour can simply be extremely erratic and buggy at times. When he works as designed, you aggro a couple of mobs, he rounds them up around himself, and you spam heals on his rapidly dropping health bar until all enemies are dead.

In reality though, I've found that pretty much in every other delve, there'll be a situation where he rounds up the mobs you pulled but then decides to charge off into the next group of mobs... and the next one... and the next one... until you've aggroed way too many enemies and end up wiping. Playing a priest, I've tried to use Leap of Faith on him on those occasions to pull him back, but he immediately runs off again and there's nothing you can do to stop him. At first I took this in stride and joked about how he was training you up for bag pugs, but it's happened so often now, it really feels like this should be something that should be avoidable. In dps and heal mode, there are safeguards in place so that if/when Brann decides to randomly drop an AoE on a new mob group you didn't even want to pull, they just ignore it unless you engage them in combat yourself. I'm not sure why tank Brann is allowed to pull all over the place and doesn't follow the same model.

In rarer but no less infuriating instances, he'll do the exact opposite and just decide not to do anything at all. Just this morning I did a Tak-Rethan Abyss, and on the last boss, Brann just refused to engage for some reason. He somehow held aggro, but barely took any damage and did absolutely none himself. Do you have any idea how long it takes to kill a tier 11 boss with a lot of movement requirements by yourself as a holy priest?! The fight lasted for about fifteen minutes until my concentration finally failed me, I stepped on a mushroom and got one-shot. I then changed Brann's role to dps and on the next attempt we killed it just fine, but not until after I'd subjected my husband to a lot of ranting about what an absolute maniac and "bearded menace" tank Brann was.

I can only hope that Blizzard will be able to fine-tune his performance over time, or even better, that they'll give us some means of actually controlling him in the future. I presume that there are additional concerns here that this might make him too OP or be abusable in some way, but being unable to stop him from pulling or to make him attack when you're in a fight and he just twiddles his thumbs is way worse in my opinion.

Fun in Undermine

Whatever gaming time hasn't gone into SWTOR's Galactic Season 8 over the past month, I pretty much spent on WoW's Undermine patch. Somewhat to my own surprise, I've been very focused on delves... but that's a post for another day I guess.

First I wanted to jot down some thoughts on Undermine the zone. It's an unusual one in so far as Blizzard have never created a patch zone before that consists entirely of a single city. Regardless of how one might feel about the goblin aesthetic, the main thing that has stood out to me about that is that it really requires you to learn the lay of the land in a way that isn't usually the case in regular overland zones. Normally you can tell quite easily what's a friendly hub, where hostile encampments are likely to pose greater danger, and what counts as an "in-between space" with average mob density. Undermine on the other hand is all town, all the time, and while the majority of it is fairly safe to traverse, there are definitely "bad" parts of town, where you'll be attacked on sight, and it was a real learning experience figuring out where that happens. (I hate The Heaps so much.)

Aside from that, there is no flying, which I'm sure was controversial with some but I didn't really mind. I quite appreciate an opportunity to get out a good old ground mount to be honest - and that is in fact how I get around most of the time, as I don't care for the zone's D.R.I.V.E. system at all. I don't drive in real life and I always thought racing games were boring, so giving me a race car was never likely to excite me. I was willing to give it a go, and I can put up with it for the occasional speed boost if I really want to get from one end of town to the complete opposite side, or when I want to take part in the surge pricing event, but the rest of the time I'm happy to just ride along on my old four-legger. This also saves me from constantly having to get in and out of the car every time I see something shiny to loot.

And there is a lot of that. You'd think that Undermine would be a dream come true for me in that regard, but to be honest I've actually found it to be somewhat overwhelming. I quite enjoy just cruising around and seeing what treasures and rares I encounter along the way, but the sheer number of them in all corners of Undermine actually kind of gives me sensory overload. This is also where the general layout of the buildings comes in to be annoying, with every house having multiple floors with narrow staircases and some buildings having points of interest on the outside as well, so it's not unusual to spend an exasperating amount of time legging it up and down multiple flights of stairs just to find that the mini map icon you were looking for is actually in another castle. There was also this one world quest on a roof somewhere that I just couldn't find access to, and when I finally googled it, it turned out I had to talk to an unassuming NPC for a free jetpack or something? I think back to how often I got turned around inside Northshire Abbey alone as a noob learning to navigate in a virtual 3D space for the first time, and I feel like to past me, Undermine would've been the stuff of nightmares.

Navigational obstacles aside, the zone is... pretty good. As someone who wasn't the biggest fan of goblins, I was sceptical, but it's fun enough. The story lived up to its promise of taking the goblins more seriously again without losing the humour, and I enjoyed seeing Xal'atath get mad (one good thing about my dislike for her is that when things don't go her way in the story, it's extremely satisfying). The music is great and I'm always humming along to the different tunes playing in various sub zones.

That said, I still prefer to "hang out" in the launch zones, probably because a lot of my "hanging out" consists of flying around and gathering, and Undermine doesn't have much to offer in that regard aside from a few stray gathering nodes inside the sewers (which to be honest is just another nuisance in itself, always having to locate the right sewer entrance to climb down to where you saw the ore node). Still, I've spent enough time there to max out the main faction's renown track, so there's that.

I also did one round of the Liberation of Undermine raid in LFR. Like last tier, the devs added a solo mode of the last fight again, and this time it was actually a required step to progress the main storyline instead of a side quest that was added later and easy to overlook. I was just baffled that it was still time-gated behind the regular raid. For all the ways Blizzard have slowly chipped away at raiding's unique incentives over time, they just can't seem to let go of "raiders must be the first ones to see the end of the story" for some reason, which is weird because I'll be very surprised if lore is high up on many modern WoW raiders' priority list.

Anyway, eventually the solo mode unlocked too. It was still a bit silly how the game didn't trust me to actually tank and slotted me into the NPC group as sucky dps, but it was a good opportunity to watch the ending cut scene in peace. Then I once again still wanted to do LFR to see the rest of the raid, and to be honest it was largely the same as usual, which is to say, not as bad as people sometimes say it is and well worth my while to see the story once, but I can't see myself investing the time in running it multiple times, even with the new raid renown track they added in this time. I'll just give an honorary shout-out to Stix Bunkjunker, who was probably the funniest raid boss I've ever seen in WoW, and my husband was quite amused while listening to my gleeful giggling and cackling throughout the entire fight.

All in all, Undermine delivered on its promise to give WoW players lots of new things to do, and apparently the next minor patch is already lined up to add a whole bunch of other new activities. There's no time to be bored in modern WoW.

Jason Schreier's "Play Nice"

Jason Schreier is a big name in gaming journalism, and when I first heard that he was going to publish a book about the history of Blizzard, I got quite excited. I would've even bought it on launch day, but then I found out that for some reason physical publication in the UK was delayed by something like two months, which kind of made me lose interest. I just watched/read some coverage of the book around the time of its release in the US and then mostly forgot about it again.

Until the other day that is, when it suddenly reappeared on my radar for some reason and I decided to finally pick it up. It was an enjoyable read, and I gave it four stars on Goodreads.

I especially appreciated the earlier chapters, because as someone who knew nothing about Blizzard before I started playing World of Warcraft, I always had very limited knowledge of the company's early years. I'd sometimes see people make comments about Blizzard North or Vivendi and have no real idea what they were talking about. Now I do, so in that regard, the book was very enlightening. The chapters about more recent developments were admittedly a lot less interesting, as they mostly covered events that I'd basically seen play out live on social media/in the news as they happened, and in greater detail than was covered in the book.

What really kind of disappointed me though was how little coverage there was about World of Warcraft. To be honest, the main reason I bought the book was that I was hoping for some juicy behind-the-scenes information about just why the devs made certain decisions in regards to the game's development over the years. What were they thinking when subscriptions stagnated during Wrath of the Lich King? What insights did they gain from players' responses to Cataclysm? Just why did Warlords of Draenor turn out the way it did? That sort of thing.

However, for some reason the game and its development got what I felt was very little coverage for something that's presumably been keeping the lights on at Blizzard for the last two decades. There's a chapter about its development and launch, and later there are a few pages dedicated to the release of Classic, but that's kind of it. Occasionally there'll be a reminder that WoW was still releasing expansions but that's as far as it goes, which really struck me as a big oversight.

One of the major themes of the book is the struggle between devs wanting to prioritise player enjoyment and corporate wanting to focus more on monetisation, and I figured WoW in particular would offer a lot of ground to cover on that topic. Talk about the release of the sparkle pony! The introduction of character boosts! The WoW Token! But nope, not a word about any of these things.

Considering the amount of random developers that get name-dropped throughout the book, it was also surprising that there wasn't even a mention of Ion Hazzikostas, considering how many years he's been at the helm of WoW by this point. Maybe he intentionally didn't want to be part of this book, but considering Jason's seeming lack of interest in WoW-related goings-on, I also wouldn't be surprised if he simply didn't consider talking to him.

In summary, "Play Nice" is a well-researched history of Blizzard and definitely relevant to anyone with an interest in Blizzard and/or the PC gaming industry, but for WoW players in specific, it's not as insightful as I would've expected.

I used to hope that Jason would write a similar book about Bioware one day so I could learn more about what happened behind the scenes of SWTOR's post-launch development, but at this rate it doesn't look like that subject would get much coverage even if such a book were to happen.

All Classes at 80!

This morning my mage hit level 80 from completing a delve, causing the achievement "Class Connoisseur" to pop up - for getting one of every class to max level. This is hardly an amazing feat nowadays, considering how fast and easy it is to level in retail, but I still felt quite a sense of accomplishment.

Back in my early days of WoWing, when I was at my most invested in the game, it wouldn't have been feasible for me to level up so many characters, as levelling was still quite time-consuming and you had to be really devoted to alting to have multiple max-level toons. When I reinstalled the game for Shadowlands, levelling was quick and I did ultimately level a few alts, but there wasn't much incentive for me to do this with a lot of different characters. It was only during Dragonflight that I got more invested again and started to bring more characters up in levels, which laid the foundation for me ultimately getting one of each class to 80 this expansion.

I wrote two previous posts about this process, which you can find here (in which I talked about playing evoker, warrior, priest and death knight) and here (for notes on hunter, druid, paladin, monk and rogue). This left warlock, demon hunter, mage and shaman for me to work on, which I'll talk about in this post.

Destruction Warlock

I've repeatedly stated in past posts that warlock is among my least favourite classes in WoW, and that the retail version of the class seems particularly confusing to me. The only reason I got this one levelled up was Mists of Pandaria Remix, and in a way it's no surprise that I left levelling her to 80 close to the end of my list. The class kit remained confusing to me the entire time, and a lot of my XP came just from flying around and picking flowers. More than once I died to regular mobs while doing this because I couldn't figure out what the heck I was doing.

And then I hit 80 and it was as if a switch had been flipped. I did the Awakening the Machine event and everything seemingly just exploded, regardless of which buttons I pressed. I one-shot normal mode Zek'vir with ease and even gave ?? a try as a warlock for a while. It was weird.

Of course, before I could get too invested, patch 11.1 came out, and even though officially only a single one of my talent points had been reset, I quickly noticed that several of my key abilities had disappeared, and I haven't felt motivated enough to do a deep dive to figure out whether that's due to more talent changes, intentional ability removal or what. I just know that warlock remains a bit of a weird one to me.

Havoc Demon Hunter

My demon hunter was actually my first max-level alt back in Shadowlands, but at some point my interest in playing her kind of dropped off. I do remember that there was a period during Dragonflight when the class felt annoyingly squishy out in the open world, but that was later remedied, and now every time I do play her I think "This is actually kind of fun; I don't know why I don't play this character more often" but then I immediately forget about her again. Maybe that's just an inevitable side effect of having so many alts, especially since I'm not too keen on melee dps. I've been playing my monk a lot more and I guess that covers all my melee needs for the time being.

Restoration Shaman

Considering that this was my "Remix main" and that resto shaman was super flavour of the month during War Within season one, I was kind of surprised by how much I did not feel like playing this character. I've levelled her now, but I still don't enjoy playing her a great deal for some reason. My best guess is that it's because in the (very) distant past I used to enjoy playing resto as melee while soloing, but that doesn't really seem possible anymore in the current game, so all you're left with is shooting a lot of lightning bolts and lava bursts, a play style I never enjoyed. But even while actually healing, the spell selection feels weirdly limited and clunky to me somehow; I don't know. There's probably something I'm missing here but I'm not sure I can be bothered to find out what it is.

Arcane Mage

Mage is one of the few classes where I've actually played as all three specs at some point in the past. I still tend to think of frost as my favourite spec, but when I revived this old character it turned out she was still specced arcane from around Wrath of the Lich King and I decided to just roll with it. The optimised arcane rotation is supposedly extremely complicated, but in everyday play I mostly press one button over and over, with the occasional addition of two others if they light up with a proc. I'm sure it would give some people hives to watch, but it's fun enough for me. I was actually kind of surprised that I ended up leaving this character until last but that's just how things panned out. We'll see whether she can earn herself a better spot in my roster this tier.

Musings on Goblins

War Within's latest patch, Undermine(d), is all about goblins. I like it well enough so far, but we'll see how it holds up in the long term. Either way, it's made me think about goblins a lot and how my perception of them has changed over time.

Looking at how goblins were presented in Vanilla, I always pictured them as natives of tropical islands. We originally encounter them in four different settlements, and aside from Everlook, they are all located on or near the beach of a zone with a warm climate. They seemingly like to cook with fish and clams a lot (the original artisan cooking quest is given by a goblin and rewards you with a stack of "Clamlette Surprise", plus there's that recipe for "Undermine Clam Chowder").

There are quite a few mentions of Undermine in the classic quests, but I've got to admit that despite the name, it never would've occurred to me that the place was underground. At the end of the quest chain from Booty Bay that has you collecting hides from increasingly dangerous crocolisks, the quest giver mentions that his creations will be on "the next boat to Undermine", so I always thought it was just an island.

In terms of their nature, vanilla goblins are portrayed as curious, enterprising and uninterested in the faction rivalries between Alliance and Horde. It's not surprising to find a random goblin out in the middle of nowhere, and if he's a vendor, you know he'll have something rare or interesting for sale. Their quests tend to be pretty straightforward fetch/kill quests, which may sound boring, but by the time you encounter most of these you'll be in higher-level territory where quests start to get more sparse and you're just grateful for something to do. Goblin NPCs often come across as a bit single-minded and greedy, but in a "good-natured scoundrel" sort of way, and they still care about other things too. Alchemist Pestlezugg warns both the Horde and the Alliance about the looming threat posed by the silithids for example, and Umi Rumplesnicker makes you travel all over Kalimdor just to play a prank on her friends.

And then Cataclysm came out and everything was different. I went through the blog's archives to find what I had to say about the goblin starter zone when it first came out and only found this post from 2011, in which I stated: "Those zones seem to be the kind of content that people either love or hate, and unfortunately my reaction fell on the negative side of the spectrum. Kezan and the Lost Isles just felt nothing like the Azeroth I used to know, and while I can generally appreciate pop culture references and the like, the goblins went overboard with it in my opinion."

I actually never rolled another goblin after that, so I thought I'd use the occasion of patch 11.1 to revisit Kezan and the Lost Isles just to see how I'd feel about them one and a half decades later. Now, I didn't hate the experience at first, but it still felt very weird. I just told you how I perceived the goblins in Vanilla, right? Well, come Cataclysm they are suddenly polluting hyper-capitalists whose every sentence is some sort of anachronistic joke. The very first quest has you going around applying electric shocks to some slaves for fun, and I mean, I don't want to look at this stuff too seriously, but still... yikes.

At least I got to look cute. I say that as someone who's not usually a fan of short races.

I also forgot that you start the experience with a temporary car and a lot of the intended fun seems to be in running people over. I guess Grand Theft Auto 4 must have just come out while they were working on this? Then you play this parody of American football and the implied joke is that you kicking a specially modified ball/bomb up the mountain is what unleashes Deathwing upon the world. It's just one bizarre scenario after another.

(Now, it was extra funny when I hit level 10 and got a call (?) from Ebyssian calling me a hero of the Horde and that I should go to the Dragon Isles while I was just fighting my way through a cave after having been shipwrecked. However, I'm more willing to be forgiving of content that is more than a decade apart not meshing well than of how weird the goblin starter zone was by itself.)

By the Lost Isles things started to feel like a real drag once again. You're locked into this hyper-linear plot that makes no sense and just has you endlessly running back and forth completing one joke task after another. Fetch an egg from a giant mechanical chicken! Blow up a shark with a laser! Mow down hordes of faceless pygmies with a mounted cannon! Wait, I thought we were shipwrecked and struggling to survive a moment ago? Oh look, the volcano is blowing up, get on this plane that we now have for some reason, time to dog-fight with some gnomes!

It's not that I didn't find any of it amusing (it had been so long I'd genuinely forgotten most of the story and I did at least crack a smile at the quest where a goblin captive in a cage barely has time to point out that their captors have keys before you start blowing things up with rockets instead), but it was just nothing but a succession of nonsense and I was definitely reminded of why Cata made me lose all interest in goblins and why I never had the urge to repeat this starter zone, ever.

In the run-up to patch 11.1, I saw multiple dev interviews where they felt the need to emphasise that they wanted the goblins to be more than joke characters in Undermine(d), and I'm glad to say that that's been true so far at least (the story is time-gated so I've only seen the first three chapters or so at this point). The same old stereotypes are still there, but we do see goblins caring about a variety of things and while there are still plenty of humorous NPCs and encounters, it's a lot more coherent and not just a bunch of random nonsense.

And yet, as I open yet another trash can filled with grey items that was marked as "treasure" on my Undermine mini map for some reason, I still can't help but wonder how we ended up here, with goblins speaking in New York accents and living underground among neon-lit filth. I mean, were they always meant to be like this and it just wasn't conveyed that well in the environmental storytelling in Vanilla WoW? Or if not, how and why did we get here? And did literally nobody but me find the way the goblin lore developed in Cata strange?